AIO-TFRC: a light-weight rate control scheme for streaming over wireless

Abstract

Rate control is an important issue in video streaming applications for both wired and wireless networks. A widely accepted rate control method in wired networks is TCP friendly rate control (TFRC). TFRC assumes that packet loss in wired networks is primarily due to congestion, and as such is not directly applicable to wireless networks in which the main cause of packet loss is at the physical layer. In our previous work, we proposed MULTFRC as an end-to-end based solution to this problem. By opening appropriate number of TFRC connections, MULTFRC not only avoids modifications to the network infrastructure or protocol stack, but also results in full utilization of the wireless channel. In this paper, we propose an alternative end-to-end approach to MULTFRC, denoted by AOI-TFRC. AIO-TFRC enjoys all the advantages of MULTFRC except that it combines multiple connections into one connection in order to reduce implementation complexity, and undesirable consequences of "quantization effect" associated with MULTFRC. NS-2 simulations are carried out to characterize AIO-TFRC's performance, and to show its fairness with respect to TCP. The reduced complexity of AIO-TFRC makes it appealing for actual implementations on mobile handheld devices.